Furl Williams came from a Paulding County farm to a segregated Lima in 1937 and hired on as a chipper at Ohio Steel. The discrimination rankled, but his nonviolent protest made small inroads, opening swimming pools and lunch counters to Blacks. He went from being president of UAW Local 975 at Ohio Steel to international representative with the UAW-CIO. He ran for city council and eventually became the first Black man to be elected to citywide office when he won the council presidency in 1979.
Courtesy of Allen County Historical Society
On New Year’s Day 1942, a little more than three weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, The Lima News wrapped up the momentous year just past and pondered the uncertain year ahead.
“Lima is especially fortunate in having all its major industries engaged in defense production,” Frank Hackman Jr., a statistician at the chamber of commerce, wrote in The Lima News. “With the Lima Locomotive Works, Inc., Ohio Steel Foundry Co., Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Co., Solar refinery of the Standard Oil Co. of Ohio, Superior Coach Corp., Illinois and Buckeye pipelines, Steiner Bros., Lima Cord Sole and Heel Co., Lima Electric Motor Co., Buckeye Machine Co. and numerous other smaller ones dedicated to defense production, shortage of essential war materials has not dented the city’s industrial life.”
For 1942, Hackman predicted a “steady increase in industrial activity” with a “demand for many more skilled workers.” Hackman had no idea.
“Thriving war industries have placed Lima in a class as one of the busiest and fastest growing cities its size in the country,” The Lima News wrote on New Year’s Day 1943, estimating Lima’s population grew by more than 5,000 in 1942. “Almost at every turn figures blare forth a story of a faster pace, much faster than had ever been anticipated before the attack on Pearl Harbor.”
With industry expanding and the war cutting into the pool of available workers, many Lima manufacturers faced a labor shortage. Nowhere was the problem more acute than at Ohio Steel, where, according to an August 1943 article in The Lima News, 1,400 more men and women were needed to meet “production schedules” for war materials.
Led by John E. Galvin, Ohio Steel, which, unlike most local manufacturers, had employed Blacks for years, found those workers in the rural South. Although Galvin’s recruiters lured Appalachian whites from Kentucky and West Virginia to Lima, many more workers came from among the Black population, largely from Alabama and particularly from the area around the city of Florence in the northwestern part of the state.
The Black workers recruited by Ohio Steel during World War II were part of the great migration of Blacks from the South to the industrial cities of the North between 1930 and 1950.
“In Lima, the migration climaxed during World War II, when manpower shortages and the availability of jobs in wartime industry formed a lure for blacks who were looking for economic opportunity and a new life outside the Jim Crow South,” The Lima News wrote in March 1999. The movement “contributed dramatically to making Lima the complex, diversified community it is today,” The Lima News wrote.
“There had been African Americans in Allen County almost since the beginning. James and Martha Robinson had a farm northeast of Lima in 1837. By 1900 Lima had 731 black residents, and the number increased slowly but steadily, reaching 1,243 in the 1920 census,” The Lima News wrote, adding that most in those days were drawn by the chance to buy land or the prospect of domestic work.
“In the 1940s, people came mainly for jobs, and the biggest draw was Ohio Steel,” The Lima News wrote. “During the war, employment at the foundry grew from 900 to 2,500. Many came on their own, alerted by relatives or simply attracted by word of mouth about plentiful jobs in a town in Ohio. But Ohio Steel also employed recruiters to scour up additional manpower.”
Meanwhile, a Black man who was already at the foundry when those war workers arrived in Lima would also have an outsized impact in changing the city. During a long career as a union representative at the foundry and later as a Lima city councilman and council president, Furl Williams fought for workers’ rights and civil rights. When he died 30 years ago, Williams was hailed as Lima’s “true patriarch.”
Born in Paulding County’s Washington Township in 1907, Williams grew up on a farm. In a 1987 interview, he recalled “some of my hardest work experiences” involved a short-handled hoe and long rows of sugar beets on his family’s farm. At the end of a row, “you couldn’t straighten up,” he remembered. “I’d have to lay down on the ground. I gradually straightened out before I could ever get up on my feet.”
Around the age of 15, Williams said, he came to Lima to help build Roosevelt elementary school on West Spring Street, which was completed in September 1924, stayed in Lima for several years, moved to Lorain and eventually returned to Lima.
“The Black community at that time was in the west end of Lima for the most part,” Williams said.
Most of the jobs available to Blacks were in the service industry “except there was only one industry that hired Blacks, and that was the Ohio Steel Foundry company,” noted Williams, who went to work in the foundry in 1937. “About all their employees were either Blacks or Italians. There were a lot of Italians come into Lima at that time, and of course the jobs were very hard, rough, dirty work. I often told people that everything in the Ohio Steel Foundry when I went to work there was either hot or heavy, and most of them were both, hot and heavy.”
Lima’s new Black residents, mostly forced to live south of Fourth Street in Victory Village and the nearby Union Park Trailer Camp, found the city was as segregated as any in the South, although it wasn’t as blatant about it.
“De facto segregation was a fact in Lima at least into the mid-1950s,” The Lima News wrote, noting that theaters and lunch counters were segregated and restaurants “commonly served Black customers only on a take-out basis.”
That didn’t sit well with Williams, who by 1947 had been elected president of UAW Local 975 at Ohio Steel. One day, he told The Lima News in 1984, he’d had enough and didn’t want his sandwich to go; he wanted to sit down and eat.
“The restaurant ownership threatened to call the police. He told them not to bother, he’d call the police on his own,” The Lima News wrote. “When two officers arrived, they agreed with Williams that he should be allowed to eat inside the restaurant. The restaurant was fined $25 for the offense.”
Williams, who retired from Ohio Steel in 1972, would fight other, bigger battles over the years.
“In the 1950s, Williams led the United Auto Workers. In the ‘60s he helped captain the city through turbulent times and racial tensions. And in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Williams took his place as a leading voice in city government,” The Lima News wrote Aug. 22, 1993, the day after Williams died at the age of 85. Williams was elected to represent the 6th Ward in 1969 and became the first black to win a city-wide election when he won the race for council president in 1979, a position he held until 1991.
SOURCE
This feature is a cooperative effort between the newspaper and the Allen County Museum and Historical Society.
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See past Reminisce stories at limaohio.com/tag/reminisce
Reach Greg Hoersten at [email protected].
